Doreen Massey

This paper explores the spatial dimensions of a northern landscape – the Flodden battlefield. This is the focal site of the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum; the centre to a network of 40 other sites around the United Kingdom which together interpret the Flodden story. However, this distributed network does not fit easily with the foundational ecomuseum concept of 'territory' as the boundary around a shared heritage, memory and community. The relative merits of three concepts of ecomuseums are discussed in relation to the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum. Inspired by Doreen Massey's interpretation of space, this study explores multiple dimensions of Flodden space through four semiautobiographical journeys to the Flodden battlefield during the author's life: as a family holiday; a teenager with interest in military strategy; an early career field geologist; a project manager working with the local community and artists. The article concludes by suggesting the word territory may not be appropriate for ecomuseums: it suggests that Peter Davis's favoured term place may be an improvement; however, it ends by proposing that space may be an even better word for the geographic context of ecomuseums.

Imagine a great turtle swimming through space carrying four elephants on its back. Now imagine that these four elephants in turn are carrying an enormous disc; and on this disc myriad beings exist. It is on this unfamiliar and imagined Discworld that we are able to follow the stories of many cultures and subcultures that seem so similar to our own. Perhaps this is the genius of Terry Pratchett's Discworld where the familiar is made strange and the strange made uncannily familiar. In Pratchett's Discworld series, with well over forty novels, the imagined fantastical spaces that are disturbingly recognisable are where the device of satire is comically employed. It is through satire that we are brutally made aware of many worldly problems. Pratchett's pen transforms the fantastic into " a glorious vehicle for satire on contemporary mores and institutions. " 1 Furthermore, " Rather than remaining in the parody genre […], Pratchett's creation began addressing issues of a more serious context and relatable to the real world " 2 And this is no exception when it comes to the topic of gender, along with the social injustice and societal expectations that are thrust upon gender roles. In Equal Rites, for example, the preconceived notions of what males and females are capable of and what they are allowed to become by custom and hence society are humorously questioned. Following the story of one Eskarina Smith who is accidentally given the power of wizards, which is reserved only for men, we see how one is forced to create a feminine space within a hierarchical masculine society constituted within Unseen University. On another note, in Feet of Clay we meet Cheery Littlebottom, a dwarf who is able to openly exhibit her femininity within the City Watch, the multicultural police force of the cosmopolitan city of Ankh-Morpork. The Watch and the colourfully boisterous metropolitan city both create an entwining space where Cheery is emancipated from ancient customs that deny the existence of female dwarfs which collectively, and ironically, assume that all dwarfs are obviously male.

En este trabajo se revisan las teorías sobre el espacio y el territorio que más impacto tienen en el estudio antropológico. Ellas comprenden la teorías de los lugares centrales de Walter Christaller, la geometría del poder de Doreen Massey, la heterotopología de Foucault, el ritmanalisis de Henri Lefebvre, la noción de cronotopo de Mihail Bajtin y la geografía crítica de la escuela de Seattle, entre otras muchas. Mientras que en otros estudios recientes ajusto cuentas con diversos pensadores franceses (tales como Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Edgar Morin y Pierre Bourdieu) este trabajo constituye mi enfrentamiento más hondo y amplio con las ideas de Michel Foucault.

En este libro se examinarán los principales acontecimientos que tuvieron lugar, que lo siguen teniendo y que sin duda lo tendrán en el futuro en torno del concepto de geo­metría del poder (en lo sucesivo, GP), una idea que se fue articulando en un puñado de disciplinas endé­micamente mal comunicadas entre sí y sometidas a una sucesión de mo­das epistémicas más o menos efíme­ras y de impacto fluctuante, pero que en ciertas va­­riantes y en tiempos recientes muestra cierto impulso en el mercado con­cep­­tual de las ciencias sociales por ra­zo­nes que distan de estar claras.

Aquí propongo entonces exa­minar la idea desde una pers­­pectiva an­­tropológica y en relación con proble­má­ticas te­rri­toriales en una va­riedad de con­textos para tratar de aquilatar su valor en la teoría y en la prác­tica a tra­vés de los casos, a fin de deslindar si existen en ella los ins­tru­­mentos fruc­tosos que se nos dice o si se trata de un enésimo retorno, con leves re­to­ques, de un gé­ne­ro me­ta­narrativo agotado hace tiempo pero que cada tanto insiste en ofrecernos más de lo mismo y en en­cerrarse (o encerrarnos) en confrontaciones que ya han superado el término de su vida útil: la dis­cusión inconcluyente en torno de la primacía del espacio o del lugar, o so­bre la pre­ce­den­cia del tiempo o del espacio, o sobre la dialéctica en­tre lo espa­cial y lo social, o sobre la dicotomía entre la revolución cuanti­ta­ti­va y el giro cualitativo de turno, todo ello acompañando al cierre de las disci­plinas sobre sí mis­mas, a la exa­­cer­­­ba­ción del culto a persona­lidades cada vez menos creíbles, a la presión para su­mar­nos a bogas teóricas que se saben efímeras y al con­for­mismo san­ciona­do por la co­mu­nidad intelectual ante la declinación de las teorías ligadas a prác­ticas transfor­ma­doras.

Meanwhile/Becoming is a practice-led research project that includes a written thesis and a final exhibition of work investigating methods of creating photographs that do not conform to the Cartesian perspective prevalent in photographs taken with a standard format camera. The research explores the opportunity of examining a visual space other than that offered by the standard single lens reflex camera through manipulation of the pinhole camera.

The photographic series that constitutes Meanwhile/Becoming uses processes that produce what the research describes as a reinterpretation of phenomenology, postphenomenology and posthumanism through photographic practice; where the photographs are expressive of the what and how humans see and the lived experience of the situated perspectives of a specific space. The research question reflects and critiques this position asking, if multiple viewpoints are presented within a single photograph, does the resulting photograph incorporate the human experience of, relation to and presence in, the world? Once expressed within this framework, the research questions if these multiple viewpoints more closely represent the physiology of how humans see.

The concept of the meanwhile is taken as the timespace between events, examining the “meanwhile” through the landscape of the domestic garden. “Becoming” refers to “the movement between events”, an interval between events that allows the processes of creativity and change through differentiation and duration, identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004) and Henri Bergson (1911).

Together, my practice and thesis interrogate the restricted boundaries of the Cartesian model of constructed visual space through the apparatus of a unique purpose-built multiple pinhole camera. This apparatus mediates between me and the world, enabling me to develop a new method of making photographs that considers space/place and how we respond to it both physically and perceptually.

While both Emilio Salgari and Amitav Ghosh base their narratives on research, Ghosh's description of the Jungle area feels more compelling. The reason is not so much in Ghosh's own superior knowledge of the place, as in his ability to situate it within a network of lines that connect the archipelago to the rest of the world, while Salgari uses the jungle to create a place apart.

This study develops a utopia, named distopia, positioned as a utopia of dissidence and cultural pluralism, also described as difference. The term distopia is a neologism formulated to invoke productive elements of utopia (such as a vision for an improved sociocultural sphere), with aspects of dystopia (namely, scepticism regarding the prevalent), whilst evading the potential naiveté of utopia as well as the hopeless resignation that dystopia can encourage. The term also denotes the political expedience of dissent. Utopia is analysed in terms of its form, content, or function, and according to its underlying sociocultural dynamic, which is, in turn, determined by intersecting permutations of space and time. This study furthermore categorises utopias as either representative of the same (that is, of the institutional, political, discursive, ideological and sociocultural status quo), or of the other. The other is defined here as an agent marginalised along the vectors of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Distopia is, accordingly, a dissenting utopia of the other, formulated to address, in particular, sociocultural exclusion and human rights violations linked to the parallel projects of neocolonial exploitation and of destabilising globalisation practices driven by neoliberal ideology. The utopias of three Dutch visual artists, namely Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005), and Jonas Staal (b. 1981) in collaboration with Moussa Ag Assarid (b. c.1975), are critiqued through the lens of distopia. This is done in order to assess the status of productive difference and engagement with the other in their respective utopias, created over the course of a century.

This volume investigates the ways in which Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and Carolyn See’s There Will Never Be Another You engage with the physical, ideological, and socially constructed “real-and-imagined” spaces of colonialism, justice, diaspora, and risk. Building on a range of theoretical approaches to the production of space, this study argues for the significance of literature as a cartographic practice charting the intricacies of the socio-spatiality of human life. Through rigorous readings, this book examines each novel as a critical map that both represents and explores contested spaces and alternative spatial negotiations. These spatially oriented literary analyses contribute to recent conceptualizations of space as socially and relationally produced, open, dynamic, and contested, and enrich the existing scholarship on the novels discussed here.

El Samaná Norte, un asentamiento rural ubicado entre el Oriente y el Magdalena medio antioqueños, Colombia, ha sido considerado como una frontera, una zona periférica sumida en el atraso y alejada de todo protagonismo regional. El presente libro es un esfuerzo por mostrar cómo esta pequeña localidad puede entenderse desde los planteamientos de la geografía crítica contemporánea. Para ello se apoya en  la propuesta teórica de la geógrafa británica Doreen Massey, quien define el espacio como una construcción social; como el encuentro de trayectorias, discursos y prácticas que articulan una geografía del poder. Desde esta base conceptual, el trabajo se apoya en el método etnográfico para resaltar el papel del lugar y de sus habitantes en la configuración del espacio regional y nacional; y explorar la complejidad económica, política y cultural de la producción de una frontera en el corazón de la zona andina colombiana.

This thesis analyzes the occupy movement within the example of Gezi in terms of place and protest. The term occupy movement indicates a contradictory couple of static and dynamic strategies. While the literature attends this new wave of mobilizations through the lens of ‘occupy’ alone, the essential component ‘movement’ is neglected. Accordingly, the existing works on Gezi mainly study Gezi Park that overshadows the experiences of a movement spread to nation-scale. To be able to shed light to these experiences, the movement and changing dynamics of protest and identity in place, this thesis studies the contention at Ankara, namely at Kızılay Square, Kuğulu Park and various neighborhoods.

This book is about relations between festivals and places as they occur at the geographical margins. The link between a festival and a place is accorded something of a special position in modern capitalism. Because the postmodern bases for the accumulation of capital call for “difference,” both the festival and the place are convenient for producing this capital. The festival is a locally “bound” activity that contributes to the difference of the place, while the place contributes difference to the festival. Through “difference,” thus, the festival and place generate a specific desire for participation, through which also the periphery can attain the semblance of centrality. Festivals have an additional role in this, since they are not only a part of a place but also a part of much broader, sometimes global, cultural spaces – and the place can also gain for itself a specific position in these spaces. Further, festivals “correct” the static aspect of places. Because in the modern world they have an important ideological role of a certain mobility and movement (“bustling”), which some places are “lacking,” a festival can be a mechanism that, at least temporarily, produces these desired attributes.

This agent-centred ethnography pays attention to festival organizers who are involved with festivals in places to which they lay claim or cultivate a special feeling towards them. The author sought them out in more or less peripheral parts of Slovenia, Italy and Macedonia. The book outlines how the organisers  have made use of festivals in order to actively change the characteristics of the places and to produce changed related imaginary geographies. With regard to such production of places, the author raises the critical question of whether festivals project merely the illusion of a “better place” or whether they give rise to a truly more “equivalent” place. At least to a certain extent, some encouraging individual ethnographic examples speak to this issue by showing that festivals function also as a method of maintaining agents’ hopes in their political project through which real changes appear in the direction of greater equality for the periphery.

The book uses various concepts for analysing the relationship between festivals and places. David Harvey’s concept of “monopoly rent” is used for the analysis of the general relation between the modern accumulation of capital and the local difference which the festival produces. The concept of “geographies of marginality” is used for describing the intimate experiences of an unequal geographical position which is simultaneously the basis for working towards changing the imaginary geography of a place in the direction of allegedly greater equality. In order to describe certain organizers, the concept of “local cosmopolitanism” is used, which is to be understood as the engaged changing of “relative location,” as defined by Sarah F. Green, to stimulate “a progressive sense of place,” as Doreen Massey defines it. An important proposition of the book concerning the organizers of numerous festivals on the periphery is that the annual repetition of a festival is a “method of hope”, as Hirokazu Miyazaki defines ongoing knowledge management at the ends of the known world and the consciousness of at least a minimal ability to affect future processes. The festival is therefore a periodic activity that gives meaning to the previous and continuous performances by agents and, at the same time, it is an incentive for their future work. This book opens up a different temporality than is common in anthropological readings of places and local identities – namely, temporality that is linked to the future and that produces new places, geographies, identities and subjectivities.

Doreen Massey, the iconic political geographer, whose book For Space has influenced the way various disciplines understand space, has largely ignored law in her work. In fact, just as most non-legal scholars she replaces law with politics. Here, I read Massey through law, arguing that often, non-legal writing is characterized by a misapprehension of the law. Through an analysis of her arguments against some understandings of space (such as systemic, negative, closed, textual), I mount a critique against the standard understandings of law (as precisely all these things) and suggest instead a lawscaping way of understanding the connection between law and space, as well as issues of spatial justice and responsibility.

My paper explores the connection between history and place-making, by analysing the historical references in two speeches (Hist. 4.17 and 4.73) by Roman general Petillius Cerialis and German rebel Julius Civilis in the Roman historian Tacitus’ account of an anti-Roman revolt led by the tribe of the Batavi in AD69.

I demonstrate that his representation of the work history can do in the hands of a good speaker is governed by two strategies: selectivity and perception. The meaning of history is shown to be in the eye of the beholder: defeats can be reframed as qualified victories, and misdating or geographically misplacing significant events can soften the Germans’ perception of their long history of Roman subjection. Subjectivity is aided by selectivity: although Tacitus has both sides draw on what they both acknowledge as a shared German past by making all seven occasions referenced involve Romans and Gallo-Germans, there is no overlap between the events mentioned by Cerialis and Civilis. Selectivity is also present chronologically. The references span almost two centuries between 113BC and AD68, but Civilis’ are clustered in the period AD9-69 and those of Cerialis in the period 113-58BC, with no mention of the century in between despite much German warfare during that time. Both speakers thus characterize their Batavia on the basis of what feminist geographer Doreen Massey called ‘envelopes of space-time’ (Massey 1995: 188): very specific and often relatively short periods of time which supposedly determine a place’s essential character and therefore also fix as static and legitimize the power structures which the particular envelope contains and supports.

Tacitus’ work, by highlighting how historical events can be enlisted in the service of legitimizing imperialism or resistance to it, reveals that skillful manipulation of the past is as much a weapon in the oppressor and the oppressed’s arsenal as military force.

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the different ways in which home is experienced by the female characters of the diaspora in Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000), On Beauty (2006) and NW (2013). In On Beauty, one of the characters declares: ‘There is such a shelter in each other’ (93). This implies that the sense of home may not be tied to a place, but to the intimacy of relationships. In these novels, Zadie Smith portrays women whose feelings of belonging to a place are threatened, due to their geographical displacements or to their complex transcultural identities. Using Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of territorialization and reterritorialization, I’ll explore how concepts of home and diaspora are reconfigured in Smith's novels.

Meanwhile/Becoming is a practice-led research project that includes a written thesis and a final exhibition of work investigating methods of creating photographs that do not conform to the Cartesian perspective prevalent in photographs taken with a standard format camera. The research explores the opportunity of examining a visual space other than that offered by the standard single lens reflex camera through manipulation of the pinhole camera. The photographic series that constitutes Meanwhile/Becoming uses processes that produce what the research describes as a reinterpretation of phenomenology, postphenomenology and posthumanism through photographic practice; where the photographs are expressive of the what and how humans see and the lived experience of the situated perspectives of a specific space. The research question reflects and critiques this position asking, if multiple viewpoints are presented within a single photograph, does the resulting photograph incorporate the human...

VI Jornadas Debates Actuales de la Teoría Política Contemporánea

El equipo de Debates Actuales invita a investigadores, docentes, estudiantes de posgrado, graduados y estudiantes de ciencias sociales y humanidades a las Sextas Jornadas Debates Actuales de la Teoría Política Contemporánea a realizarse el 17 y 18 de julio del 2015 en la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Invitamos a desarrollar una discusión de dos días en torno a siete ejes temáticos que hacen al programa de investigación del equipo de Debates Actuales de la Teoría Política Contemporánea. La propuesta es desarrollar mediante la discusión grupal un ejercicio de pensamiento colectivo. Los invitamos a pensar y a discutir los problemas políticos de nuestro tiempo.

http://teoriapoliticacontemporanea.blogspot.com.ar/

Contributing to inquiries into the geographies of theory, this article examines the vicissitudes of creating a “new power-geometry” in the urban environment through physical and social interventions in the center of Caracas, Venezuela, where the state elevated Doreen Massey’s axiomatic geographical concept into its revolutionary (“Bolivarian”) program in the late 2000s. Although not formulated for direct practical application, Massey’s notion was embraced by Hugo Chávez to enact measures and promote popular initiatives that would replace inherited structures of deep inequality in Venezuelan society. Focusing on the urban scale, the paper draws on fieldwork in the capital that surveyed Bolivarian projects of placemaking to show how power-geometry was invoked as part of a new urban agenda intended to be both radical and popular (“of the people,” in Spanish). This is not, however, a straightforward utopian project; it is tied up with competing interests and clashes with the Caraqueño landscape constructed under earlier regimes with priorities and economic scenarios that were vastly different. There are also clashes with emergent, competing visions (alternative – sometimes reactionary – power-geometries) at odds with Bolivarian policy and practice. By focusing on new social housing in central Caracas as part of the Great Venezuela Housing Mission [Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela], the article highlights the intractable ways bricksand-mortar interventions are caught up in clashing power-geometries, creating environments that transform centrality but illuminate the quandaries of applying critical geographical thought in policy, and the limits of revolutionizing the city – a project that has been prominent in numerous, politically dissimilar Latin American cases.

En este trabajo se analiza a uno de los agentes que ha participado de manera protagónica en la actualización de las funciones económicas del centro histórico de Oaxaca: el denominado comercio informal o ambulante. Desde el enfoque geográfico-relacional de la teoría de las geometrías del poder de Doreen Massey, se muestra que la trama de interacciones generadas en su entorno está mediada por una multiplicidad de formas de apropiación que configuran este espacio como un escenario de conflictos y exclusión. La conclusión se orienta a demostrar que dichas apropiaciones igualmente lo dotan de una gran vitalidad, poniéndolo en movimiento como un proceso complejo dinámico y relacional.

In this introduction to the Focus Section “Learning as a Geographical Process,” I provide a context for the four articles that follow, by means of (1) making explicit the threefold rationale for this initiative; (2) relating this initiative with previous geographical scholarship on the problematic of learning; (3) highlighting the significance of the self-referential character of our work; (4) providing a brief outline of the articles that follow; and (5) pointing out the important fact that both “learning” and “geographical process” constitute semantically rich categories and that relating the two involves a many-to-many type of logical mapping.

In higher education, the place of the college campus, as a site of experiences, histories, symbols, and encounters, has important implications for student outcomes. However, the place of campus is often treated as a static or neutral site – a black box within which student outcomes such as belongingness occur. This article argues that excavating the encounters and memories around campus monuments can serve as an entry point for unfolding how systems of colonization and white supremacy persist in higher education, offering a critical re-imagining of the concept of belongingness. Guided by McKittrick and Massey’s feminist decolonial spatial theories and Barad’s conceptualization of memory and re-membering, the article excavates two campus monuments: a boulder commemorating confederate soldiers and a clocktower honoring the legacy of the first Black students at the University. These monuments are memory objects, memorializing particular moments in time on campus, and thus becoming part of the current reproductions of place. Through tracing the memories of campus monuments into the entanglements of the present climate of higher education, this article offers implications and considerations for institutions grappling with their history and responsibility to the past.

Spatial stigmatisation – naming spaces with high concentration of poverty as a slum or ghetto – has been well covered in the critical urban geography and sociological debates. Yet, these discussions have neglected to theorise the intersection between the production of stigmatised space and the governance of its inhabitants within the context of one of Germany's most stigmatised boroughs. By situating Berlin-Neukölln within historical processes of capital accumulation, I show how the discursive, institutional and material practices of neoliberal social policies have played a central, albeit contradictory, role in (reproducing g stigmatise spaces and subjects along racialised, gendered and class lines. This is particularly evident with regard to neoliberal governance strategies that employ and apply the power of public money to repress and integrate impoverished workers into contemporary capitalist society, or what I refer to as the 'monetisation of socio-spatial reproduction.'

This paper is part of a book review forum on Mark Purcell's "The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy", where I argue that the boundary between childhood and adulthood is deeply problematic and consequently we cannot discount the political agency of children, particularly in building a more autonomous version of democracy.

The pre-publication text of the introductory chapter to my book, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, which includes chapters on postcolonial mappae mundi, botany and botanical tropes, spice, postcolonial ecologies, representations of animals and therianthropes, and cities (London and Mumbai/Bombay).

In cinema, as in everyday life, the home is imagined to have distinct spatio-temporal qualities which distinguish it from its spatial surrounds. By paying close attention to the qualities which cinema confers upon the home, we may learn something of what is at stake in our desire for spatial belonging. In this paper, the tension between our emotional commitment to the home-space and the necessary repressions which such commitment entails is explored through detailed analysis of the 2008 French film Home (Ursula Meier) . As suggested by its title, this film brings to an explicit level the narrative and visual investment in the home-space which remains implicit within most narrative cinema. By reading the film through the spatial theories of Marc Auge and Doreen Massey, as well as through the generic prism of melodrama, this paper will seek to situate the home within the spatio-temporal categories which collectively constitute our globalised postmodern culture.

For architects and geographers, the concept of space and the developments
of the concepts of space and place have been different. Personally, I feel
that perhaps it’s to do with the fact that people from both professions are
working with different scales. Geographers work with larger scales on a
daily basis, so they are able to look at maps holistically and identify
patterns in transport, housing, road networks etc faster and better than
architects. Architects work with all types of scales generally but on a day to
day basis they handle commercial, residential projects and sometimes
urban planning projects. In comparison to geographers their handling of
scale is smaller on a day to day basis but the one thing that is central and
key to both their approaches is that they both try to be as humanistic as
possible when trying to produce work in their respective professions.
This is why I feel that perhaps because I’m an architect, when I think
about space it feels more as an abstract concept.

In this chapter, I (re)imagine the human and more-than-human entanglements that are forged in the aftermath of two different wind and stormy events. Windy storm happenings continually shift and shape the world over time and space. Thinking of human mobility as happening with an earth that is itself on the move, can offer insights into how human movement is always in relation to and becoming part of the places we move through. I draw attention to the liveliness of place using Massey’s notion of ‘place and landscape as events, as happenings’ and Yusoff’s invitation to think of the inhuman forces that shape us across time, space and matter. Stormy and windy events offer an opening to think with dramatic shifts in earth and atmosphere to reveal the ways that humans engage in an ongoing negotiation with the elements; not just as a wild bodily and affective dance with weather, but a co-mingling of agency between human and inhuman forces. The narratives presented here reveal how storms and deep earthly movements from a distant past shape and exceed the ‘here and now’ and offer an imagining of being moved in a moving world.

Zadie Smith’s novels are fraught with the most diverse characters, many of which being members of the Caribbean diaspora, living in the U.K. or the United-States. For many of those characters, neither the sense of home nor their integration in society come as a given.
In Smith’s novels, the question of home is addressed in various ways depending on the ethnicity of the characters. The objective of this paper is to focus on the sense of home as understood and lived by Caribbean women, and more generally Black women, in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, On Beauty and NW. In those novels, some women leave their beautiful houses which no longer feel like homes (Kiki Belsey in On Beauty and Natalie Blake in NW) while others seem to settle more easily (Clara Bowden in White Teeth). In On Beauty, Carlene Kipps, a Trinidadian woman, mother of two, genuinely horrified by the thought of living alone, quotes a line from a poem (actually, a line written by Nick Laird, Smith’s husband): ‘There is such a shelter in each other’ (Smith, 93). These elements suggest that the sense of home may not be tied to a place, an actual house, but to the intimacy of relationships. It also goes against the view of home as feminine, as a haven. As feminist geographer Doreen Massey suggests, home can actually be ‘a place of conflict’ and ‘many women have had to leave home precisely in order to forge their own version of their identities’ (Massey, 11), which is what happens to Kiki Belsey and Natalie Blake. If all these feminine characters have a house, not all of them have a home. According to Massey, the concepts of spaces and places are articulated in terms of social relations, places being defined on a smaller scale, by personal and intimate relations. The aim of this paper is to examine how this concept of space and place as social relations is developed in Zadie Smith’s novels. I intend to analyse how these women, members of the Caribbean diaspora, create a sense of home for themselves, particularly when their houses are not hospitable anymore. I’ll also explore how their race and gender impact both their social relations and their home-building.

RESUMO: O trabalho pretende discutir como a descontextualização dos espaços escolares tem ocorrido neste período de pandemia pelo Covid-19. A partir do aporte teórico de Masschelein e Simons (2017) e Massey (2009), são discutidas as acusações à escola agravadas neste momento de pandemia por desconsiderar suas heterogeneidades. Por fim, propõe-se o espaço escolar como lugar geográfico. Palavras-chave: Escola; Lugar; Ensino Remoto.